Overview

PROJECT ENDED
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Gender and migration in Europe: East and West revised

Until recently, much research in the field of migration tended to assume that the migrant was young, male and heterosexual. One widespread image was of a man who worked in another country for a given period in part to support a family located elsewhere. However, looking around many European cities, it is evident that this image no longer fits the reality (if it ever did). For example, in Florence, it is commonplace to see young Filipinos caring for elderly Italians, Chinese workers in the textile and catering industries, and men from Africa and Eastern Europe working on building sites. In addition, and what is less visible, are the increasing numbers of women working, amongst other things, in the domestic sphere.

The project seeks to rethink who is the subject of migration in the light of recent changes, and to challenge the assumptions of gender relations that underpinned some formerly dominant images (ie male providers and female carers). This research is interdisciplinary, combining theoretical, historical, and juridical approaches, and involving scholars from a range of disciplines.

The fieldwork for this study is based on oral histories of the lives of migrant women - mostly economic migrants but including a number of political migrants - primarily from the post-1989 period. In addition, we conduct interviews with 'host' women (ie those native to the destination countries of the migrants) about their images of migrants, and ideas about their countries of origin. The choice of these countries and this methodology allows us to see how places to the East and West of Europe are represented in the imaginations of others. We asked Italian and Dutch women (employers, friends and others with relationships to migrant women) their experiences and perceptions. For example, Italian interviewees describe Eastern European women as more invested in their domestic identities, eg. hard-working in the home, more submissive in relationships to men, and more conservative in their appearance. Often this representation was made through comparing migrants with Italian women of the 1950s and 1960s; in contrast, young Italian women are presented as too emancipated. We see the presentation of a nostalgic attitude about the Italian past that is projected in the stereotype of Eastern European women living in Italy today. This point is interesting because the inverse is true of the migrants' testimonies in which Italian women are depicted as more submissive and traditional.
We assume migration to take shape through relationships to others, key events and opportunities, fears and hopes for a better life. In the case of young Bulgarian migrants for example, flexible practical attitudes are the dominating factor in guiding the migrant-women's strategies and choices. The balance between career and family or the decision to live in Italy or The Netherlands appears in most cases as open-ended questions that are resolved according to the concrete circumstances and not according to pre-determined priorities. This nuances widespread assumptions about migrants' strategies.

We are presently in the process of analysing the interviews. Of central interest to us is in how women represent other women. In addition to the examples mentioned above, the discourses women reproduce about themselves as collective subjects and about other women differ from those, in the media for example, in which women are often presented as victims. On the contrary, the women themselves emphasise their agency in the process of migration. On the East-West relationship, it often emerges in the interviews that 'difference' is located in some other part of the world. Migrants from South America, from the Far East, Muslims, are invoked to support the idea of similar cultural attitudes between people from East and West Europe. But the boundaries are flexible during the interview narrations. For example similarities built on food and religious practices include the very same people that are excluded when referring to dress at some other point of the discussion.

Objectives of the project

With regard to the fields of enquiry of marriage and migration:

1. To formulate some theoretical insights on the specificity of gender relations in Europe.
2. To advance hypotheses about new contemporary forms of women's subjectivity from the study of women as agents of change in their own lives and environment.
3. To critically examine the conceptualisation of strategic action.
4. To explore gender in the historical construction of the idea of Europe through an analysis of the activities of the group "Femmes pour l'Europe".
5. To investigate the place of women in the process of migration.
6. To study the impact of relationships to women in host countries upon the process of migration and the forms of women's intersubjectivity in this process.
7. To explore the existence of a narrative tradition (and its possible transmission) from political migrants.
8. To analyse the strategic use of legal systems/cultures in Europe by individual men and women, and how legal cultures react; to highlight the changing relations between gender and cultural and legal norms in Europe today.